The The Newsroom Recap: The Great Newsman

Aaron Sorkin won't let his protagonist be the asshole he should be

When Aaron Sorkin says he doesn't watch a lot of TV, he's not just being one of those insufferable "I don't watch a lot of TV" people. He has a real excuse. While he's working on a show, Sorkin says, he purposely avoids watching other hour-long dramas so they don't influence him.

Generally speaking, that may be good policy for a writer. In the case of The Newsroom, it's a mistake. Here's a homework assignment for Sorkin, to be completed before he writes another episode of his latest series: Watch every episode of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Deadwood. Watch The Sopranos, or watch it again if you have already. Think about what these shows have in common. Extra credit: Google "Jaime Lannister fan fiction" and read everything that comes up.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that Sorkin is some kind of latter-day Rip van Winkle, for whom the entire first decade of the 21st century has gone unnoticed. At some point, he roused himself long enough to write a rather excellent movie about Facebook. Then it was back to bed.

The premiere episode of The Newsroom found Sorkin writing about the cable-news wars as though it were still 1996 and the CNN formula of boring centrism were still a recipe for ratings success rather than a slow-acting suicide cocktail. This week's installment instead finds him fleshing out his protagonist, anchor Will McAvoy, as though Don Draper, Walter White, and Al Swearengen had never happened. (Fictionally speaking, I mean. I know they never existed in reality. Except for Swearingen, whose real-life component could not have possibly uttered the word "cocksucker" as many times in his entire life as Ian McShane did in thirty hours.)

A lot has changed since Sorkin created his last successful series, The West Wing, in 1999. We don't need to like our protagonists anymore. In fact, it's better if we're sort of repulsed by them. To be sure, we hear a lot about what a jerk Will is. He yells at people who work for him. He forgets their names. He engages in the odd bit of mildly offensive racial stereotyping. As anti-heroes go, though, this is penny-ante stuff. Don Draper is an army-deserter, alcoholic, and compulsive cheater; Walt White kills people and sells meth. Will McAvoy is rude around the office and throw his cellphone.

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The problem is that Sorkin seems neurotically anxious for us to like his creation. Every character detail that's the least bit incriminating must immediately be offset with evidence of surreptitious sainthood. McAvoy said something cranky about undocumented immigrants? Well, maybe you should consider that he's paying for an illegal to take a taxi to work. For the benefit of the slower-witted members of the audience, Sorkin helpfully underscores this mini-character arc by framing Will, in the episode's last shot, with the Statue of Liberty behind him. It's subtle strokes like that that let you know you're watching prestige television.

In fact, we learn, Will's snarl — as in, the only interesting dimension of his character, the not-Leno part — isn't even properly part of his character at all so much as a trace of a bad breakup with MacKenzie, his ex-girlfriend and new executive producer. She cheated on him, and ever since then, he's been in a bad mood. See? He's not a jerk. He's just vulnerable.

Like Sorkin, MacKenzie can't live for even a second with the idea of anyone thinking Will is anything but New York's No. 1 Mensch, so she runs around saying things like "Will is the good guy here" and "He's an extraordinary man with a heart the size of a Range Rover." She even tells the entire company about her infidelity — a fact that Will, that misunderstood martyr, had kept a secret, preferring people to think he was the one who cheated — albeit inadvertently, via an interoffice e-mail miscue. I groaned aloud at the sitcom-iness of this plot device, set up, as it was, by an awkwardly shoehorned-in scene earlier. (A note to screenwriters: Chekhov's rule about the gun on the wall doesn't mean that any and all third-act gunplay is automatically rendered plausible by a first-act firearm.) Then I remembered that this detail is one that seems to have been, as they say, inspired by a true story: For a time, Sorkin's ex-girlfriend, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, was mistakenly sending e-mails intended for her then-beau to her colleague, DealBook editor Andrew Ross Sorkin. The New York Postdescribed one of the e-mails as "randy."

Of course, that happened in 2001, so it's questionable whether Sorkin even remembers it.

-- Jeff Bercovici is a writer for Forbes living in New York City. He has covered media for more than ten years.